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Sunday, 28 July 2013

Cerebus: In My Life - T.M. Camp

T.M. Camp is the author of Assam & Darjeeling, The Cradle,
Matters of Mortology, and the forthcoming The Red Boy. He lives in Grand
Rapids, Michigan.

Dave Sim ruined comics.

Back in 1983, I was perfectly happy to
visit my local comic shop every week (Freedonia in Orange County,
California), picking up the latest issue of X-Men and whatever
Batman-related titles caught my eye.

I was fourteen. I'd been reading comics since before I could read,
poring over the dog eared issues I'd swiped from my older brother. All
those comics fell into my hands after he got to high school and
discovered girls.

I read those comics over and over again, until they were practically furry around the edges.

Fast forward a few years. I'm wandering past the new arrivals rack in Freedonia.

Looking
back, it's clear to me that I was starting to feel the twinges of
dissatisfaction with mainstream comics. My routine each week was to go
in to the store, pick up my usual books, and then go home.

But I was starting to have that vague awareness that I wasn't the
only one with a routine. The books themselves, the storylines, were
starting to show their routines as well. You could almost see the
fatigue weighing them down issue after issue, being forced to act out
the same recycled dramas over and again, choke back the gag reflex as
they hit their mark and declared their möbius-stip derivative
catchphrase each month...

"I'm the best there is at what I do® but what I do isn't very nice™ . . . I guess?"

So I wandered the racks looking for something new . . . something different.

I failed. I ended up picking up something with Wolverine on the cover. Again.

But
. . . this one was different. The art was black and white, with a fluid
style that struck a familiar chord. And yet . . . so different.

And the main character was an aardvark.

Fair enough. I had read my brother's old copies of Howard the Duck. I wasn't prejudiced against funny animal comics.

Flipping
through the book, I realized immediately that it was something
different than anything I'd ever read in a comic before.

I also realized that I was coming into the middle of a storyline
with no idea what the hell was going on. And, for some reason, I really
really wanted to know.

I grabbed a few of the back issues that
were hiding behind the latest one. I paid for my books -- got a
approving nod from the owner, welcoming me to the next level of our
secret little society -- and went home to read them.

And read them again. And then again.

Cerebus #50 (May 1983)Art by Dave Sim(Click image to enlarge)

It was issue 50 that did it for me. So little happened in those twenty or so pages . . . and yet so much was going on.

Cerebus
bellowing "Where is everybody?" -- who was he? who was he looking for?
-- his words echoing down the hallway (and echoing in my head).

Astoria, grim and amused and beaten -- but beaten by who? -- sipping her wine. "You're looking at your administration."

And who was Jaka?

I was back the next day, digging through the longboxes to pick up as many back issues as I could afford.

Compulsion had set in. I had to know more about these characters and
what had brought them to this moment in time, when it all fell apart.

If
I recall correctly, Freedonia had a copy of Cerebus #1 behind the
counter. But the $300 price tag was way above my pay grade. Fortunately
they also had a few battered Swords of Cerebus, so now I could read the
beginning of the story.

My routine changed after that. I still bought my usual books each
month. But among them now was Cerebus -- that was the one I always saved
for last, after I'd read the others.

Eventually, I realized that most of the other books were just an annoying delay. So I read Cerebus first.

Sometimes, Cerebus was all I read. Apart from a few notable
exceptions, most comics just couldn't hold a candle to the depth and
artistry of what Dave (and, soon enough, Gerhard) were doing.

Words
fail me when I try to express what the book means to me, personally and
creatively. It's in my DNA. It taught me so much (possibly everything)
about story, pacing, and character.

And it ruined comics -- for me, at least -- for a long, long time.

I just didn't care anymore about the constantly recycled storylines and crises and deaths.

Cerebus was real in a way that most other comics only pretended to be.

But as we know all too well now, no one stays dead in comics. The
suits in Marketing have their very own Lazarus Pit and they're not
afraid to use it.

But when Bran Mak Muffin pushed that dagger
into his own heart in issue 80 . . . all the horror and shock and despair
on Cerebus' face was reflected on my own.

Because Bran was dead. He wasn't coming back. We knew it.

Cerebus #80 (November 1985)Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard

That's one example. There are hundreds of others throughout the 300 issue run of Cerebus.

I think that's part of the secret of why Cerebus works so well as a story. The finality of that 300 issue cap.

A boundary that, like death, could not be crossed. Whatever
happened, happened. And it couldn't be undone. It couldn't be rebooted
or retconned.

Cerebus only had one life. One story.

Just like the rest of us.

I have this fantasy sometimes of a world where, for instance, Batman
didn't get rebooted every few years. A fantasy world where the story of
Bruce Wayne is told in a single, unbroken storyline. All the way up to
his deathbed where, I fantasize, Dick Grayson (or one of the other
children in the Batman family) takes up the mantle. And then that story
would be told over decades.

We get glimpses of this, like distorted signals from another
dimension, in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight, in Mark Waid and Alex
Ross' Kingdom Come, in Batman Beyond.

But just imagine what the
story of Batman would have been like if it had been told with unbroken
continuity over these past decades . . . the way the story of Cerebus
was told.

In
Cerebus, Dave -- and he will always be Dave, somehow, a familiarity
earned over the years of deeply personal Notes from the President and
letter columns -- Dave did something different, something so different.
He did it with a purpose and artistry that few others can claim.

I believe that stories -- and their characters -- are alive. I
believe this not only on figurative level. I believe this literally.

And I believe that stories, as living things, have a shape. A lifespan.

They should end eventually, because that's the natural order of things. And, of course, sometimes they come back.

I think that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and (most importantly) an end.

Most
comic publishers -- at least, their marketing departments -- seem to
disagree with me. They're making soylent green, in faster and faster
cycles. And what's produced with each subsequent iteration is less
satisfying. Something is lost in all that churn.

(I'm well aware that there are some people out there doing great
comics. There are some wonderful stories being told. Some are even
coming from -- gasp -- mainstream publishers. Yes. I know. But these are
the exception that prove the rule. And I think many, if not most, of
them have some small debt to Dave and what he did with Cerebus.)

I could digress -- yes, even further -- but let's just say that I'm
grateful that Dave didn't go down that road with Cerebus. God knows, he
had the chance.

I'm resisting the temptation to digress yet
again. I could tell how Dave set the bar so high with his courage and
commitment to self-publishing, how his relentless dedication to
creator's rights challenged and inspired me . . . how following his
example saved me from making potentially the single worst mistake of my
creative life.

But that's a story for another time. And I don't want to abuse your patience any more than I already have.

2 comments:

You and I started up with Cerebus at just about the same time, Mr. Camp. And, as it did for you, Cerebus ruined comics for me, too. I had already winnowed down my list of must buys to Master of Kung Fu and the occasional other Marvel title that I used to subscribe to, in high school. Once my college friend, Paul Shaffer, turned me on to Cerebus (with the Wolveroach issues) I gave up other comics and, for a good 20 years or so, it became the ONLY comic I bought every month. Thank God some other comics creators and companies eventually took note of it and started making some quality work again.

"I AM NOT DAVE SIM"

This is an UNOFFICIAL fan-site. Although Dave Sim posts a Weekly Update here every Friday and other exclusive articles, Dave Sim and Gerhard have no control over the other content of this site ~ Tim W.